The invention relates to recognizing signals in design simulation.
To determine whether a hardware or a system design will perform as intended, the design is often simulated to produce simulated signals. Specific sets of the simulated signals make up transactions or protocols. A transaction is a set of signals that indicate a unit of interactions such as a read or write operation. A protocol refers to signals that define rules of data transmission.
Simulated transactions or protocols conventionally are verified either by producing specific signal events and data during the simulation, which is time-consuming, or using an unstructured ad-hoc post-processing program on the simulation output. Simulations of lower-level designs are not easily extendible to higher-level designs, such as full-chip or system-level designs.